eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

April 2016

04/30/2016

Brooklyn is a movie about how life can just tear you apart sometimes. It is a movie for young people who feel that they must leave their siblings and parents to find opportunity for living their own lives. It is a movie for people who are geographically separated from some beautiful place that nurtures their souls. It is a movie for people who feel disconnected from their jobs, the people that they live with, the cultures that surround them, the people that they once loved. And it is a movie for anyone who has ever had their heart spliced by competing love interests and the competing lives that they represent. It is a movie for those who understand that life weaves you together with good people and life separates you from the same, often at the same time.

Eilis, Tony, and Jim are all caught in currents that bring them together and take them apart. I won’t tell you how it all ends. Sometimes you make choices in life. Sometimes, you simply become aware that you have. Sometimes, you just have to say to yourself, “This is what I have done” and do what you can to make it come out in the end the right decision.

I would be a fool to think that watching a Hollywood movie is going to inform me what happened to the economy in 2008 though I confess to having had my understanding illuminated by the film, Margin Call, a few years ago. This 2015 film provides more illumination and confirmation and no doubt should come with a Bernie Sander’s campaign sign and bumper sticker free. The banks and governmental oversight agencies do not come off smelling sweet.

The film’s principle characters are based on the handful of people who profited from the collapse of the real estate market in 2008 by insuring themselves against significant drops in the value of investments based on home mortgages. Let’s say that you believe that a house in Miami is going to have all its pipes frozen and so you buy an insurance policy on the house that entitles you to the entire cost of the house if the pipes do get frozen. The insurance company is going to take your money because houses in Miami are not likely to have frozen pipes. And when the big freeze comes, you have reaped a benefit for little investment.

In a similar way, there were a few people who did their homework on the mortgage investments that others were investing in and they determined that the public estimates of their value over the long term was vastly over-rated. They checked the numbers. They checked the actual houses in the actual neighbohoods. They checked with the actual borrowers. They checked with the brokers that lent them the money. They checked with the SEC regulators. They checked with the rating agencies that gave the investments based on the mortgages triple A ratings. They checked with the brokerages that packaged the mortgages into investments. In short, they saw that the emperor had no clothes and they invested accordingly. They were willing to bet that a LOT of people were being duped. And their investments paid off.

One of these people was Michael Burry. Banking on the crookedness or ignorance of the banks, he invested millions of investor dollars that he controlled on his belief that mortgage based investments were full of dry-rot. He made his firm over 400 percent profit by doing so early in the game according to the film. Here are his thoughts about the dangers of thinking that the problem was the consequence of a few people who simply ought to be put in jail.

“The enablers for this crisis were varied, and it starts not with the bank but with decisions by individuals to borrow to finance a better life, and that is one very loaded decision. This crisis was such a bona fide 100-year flood that the entire world is still trying to dig out of the mud seven years later. Yet so few took responsibility for having any part in it, and the reason is simple: All these people found others to blame, and to that extent, an unhelpful narrative was created. Whether it’s the one percent or hedge funds or Wall Street, I do not think society is well served by failing to encourage every last American to look within. This crisis truly took a village, and most of the villagers themselves are not without some personal responsibility for the circumstances in which they found themselves. We should be teaching our kids to be better citizens through personal responsibility, not by the example of blame.”

“This crisis took a village.” It took people borrowing money when they did not have a job that could actually pay it off. It took granting people loans that were unsustainable for those people because there were profits to be made in loaning people money you planed to foist on some bigger bank above you. It took people to package bad loans and good loans up into such a witche’s brew of savory and unsavory meat that it was impossible for credit agencies to detect actual values. It took accrediting agencies willing to say that things had value that didn’t, or that they were only guessing about. It took banks being willing to advise people to buy the very investments that they were trying to offload when they discovered how rotten they were. It took people posing as representatives of investors when they were on the payrolls of the people making money off of investors. Imagine for a moment that you are a person who has hired a lawyer to defend you and finding out that the lawyer you have hired has been receiving money from the prosecution’s law firm.

Burry suggests that one cannot simply blame the “one percenters” because doing that is what keeps you from looking at just how the public contributed to their own demise. Incidentally, he is presently investing in water and food apparently. I suspect that if you assume that the planet is getting hotter, you must assume that there will be more water evaporating and fewer places that can grow food. So, you invest in agricultural areas that have more secure sources of water. I am just guessing.

Nice to live in Vermont I guess.

I wonder if Canadian real estate is increasing in value.

The Big Short is a movie to make you think. Whether it gives and accurate or inaccurate picture of the trustworthiness of banks today is something that only time will tell I suspect but … I have no doubt that the things to be learned about loaning people money for homes may also be applied to those who loan people money for college educations. Which is where this comes closer to home.

Question for Comment: The Federal government provides loan guarantees for millions of college students every year. In exchange for backing private loans to college students, it requires students to agree that there will be no getting out of those loans … ever. Given the realities, should students ever take out loans for courses that do not have a direct impact on the amount of money that they will make?

04/24/2016

Author, George Faller was a former NYC Fireman working at Ground Zero after 911 and co-author, Dr. Heather Wright is a minister at the first Presbyterian Church of Greenwich and a survivor of life traumas of her own. The book attempts to see the subject of stress within a therapeutic but Christian context, helping those who deal with stress to use it as an asset to a better life rather than a destroyer of it. There is a place in the book where the authors quotes Esther Perel, a therapist who has written about holocaust survivors, that there were those “who didn’t die” and those “who came back to life.” This book sets out to help those dealing with stress to “come back to life” and not simply to “not die.”

Part one of the book describes the impact that stress has on our individual interior worlds. Part two describes how stress can inflict damage upon our primary relationships (marital and parental). Part three focuses on two external causes of stress (trauma and finances). Apathy would be unhealthy for us. Distress is unhealthy for us. In between is something the authors call “eustress” [good stress]. Lev Vgotsky would call this “the zone of proximal development” where we can literally see how challenges could be met with present and available supports (if we will turn to them for help). The following passage is worth quoting in greater length as it speaks to the question of singleness, marriage, and stress.

“Susan Johnson, the founder of emotionally focused therapy, and James Coan, a neuroscientist studying brain activity, conducted a study of married women’s brains using fMRI scans to see in real time what was happening when they faced threat.

While in the fMRI machine, the women were told a flashing x meant they had a 20% chance of receiving a shock on their ankles. But in different iterations of the experiment, the brain responded in startlingly different ways.

When alone in the machine, the x triggered the women's brains to light up like a Christmas tree, and they describe the shock as intense. For women in distressed marriages and whose partners were holding their hands in the experiment, the x again lit up the brain and the pain was labeled as severe, even worse than being alone. (Science supports the old adage that being in a bad marriage feels lonelier than being alone.) Interestingly, when a stranger held the women's hands, the x triggered moderate brain activity, and the shock was described as moderate. When women fortunate enough to be in strong, healthy marriages held the hands of their husbands, their brains hardly reacted at all, and the pain was regarded as mild to nonexistent.”

Well, there you go. An excellent reason to get married or never marry or find strangers to hold your hand, depending.

Question for Comment: In the course of their discussions about stress, the authors speak of a variety of causes and cures for our human stress problems. Causes – money. trauma. terrorism. divorce. kids. grief. jobs. Etc. Cures – good marriages. healthy relationships. therapy. sex. connection. intimacy. the ability to reframe events. God. love. talking. sharing. openness. Where is the stress getting into the boat of your life, threatening to sink you? What helps you to pump it out?

“People believe to be true just what they think it is good to believe to be true.

The question is: “Should they?”

“Philosophies and theories and formal methodologies are part of our culture but they are, in Oliver Wendell Holmes's view, “the dinner jacket and bowtie we instinctively take off when it is time to change the tires.” Pragmatists like those whose work is highlighted in this anthology of writings, lectures, and essays “admonish us to act on our beliefs without waiting for philosophical confirmation of their validity.”

To know anything before experimenting is rare and not to be expected. As in the world of science, so in the world of ethics, we come to know by acting as though what we think we know is true. Pragmatists encourage us to trust our own judgments “without ever assuming them to be infallible.”

“To the extent Philosophy is an effort to erect what we know about how we know into a formal system, pragmatism cannot help acting the role of termite – undermining foundations, collapsing distinctions, deflating abstractions, suggesting that the real work of the world is being done somewhere other than in philosophy departments.”

The pragmatists then all disagree with those Cartesian souls who refuse to accept any unproven proposition into their heads. As if to say “good luck with that.”

Case in point. William James quotes Huxley who states:

"My only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage to so pretend, they will not have reached the lowest depths of immorality.”

This is echoed by one of Huxley’s colleagues, William Clifford.

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

William James and the Pragmatists are skeptical of this sort of idealism. “Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with,” says James, “but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they to be found?” “Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is mostly the case,” James says. He concludes his foundational essay on “The Will to Believe” by quoting James Fitz Stephens:

“We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? ' Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. . . . If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."

William James believes that there are worse things than being duped. “We have the right to believe at our own risk,” he insists, “any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will.”

The aim of the pragmatist thinking is not to gain certainty about everything, for that goal would only frustrate us. The reasonable aim simply attempts to assemble a set of workable notions that will play nicely with one another until some experiment or life event makes us reconsider them and revise.

The ideas in this book are essential to understanding the modern mind but, it would still be tough for me to recommend reading it in entirety. There are more words than ideas here.

Question for Comment: Of all the ideas you hold to be true in your head right now, which one is not playing nicely with the others?

04/17/2016

In the summer of 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States issued two rulings that shifted the ground under the status of same sex marriage in the United States. In the United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry decisions, the court ended the era of the Defense of Marriage Act that had been signed into law seventeen years earlier by Bill Clinton. In a day, one saw a once majority opinion become a minority opinion in the national life.

In Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy, historian Kyle Volk traces the history of America’s struggle with minority rights back into the early 1800’s and shows how the tension between a belief in majoritarian democracy conflicts with our belief in the protections of minority rights. Ironically, the arguments that are used in the past are still compelling. Laws that sanctified the Sabbath as a day of rest for all because it was the day of choice for most were challenged by those who held it a right to choose their own day of rest. Laws that enforced the majority’s opinion on alcohol were challenged by those who saw questions relating to beverage consumption as outside the purview of a majority’s discretion. When Maine passed a law to prohibit the sale of liquor in the State, resistance to such majority impositions arose throughout many of the other states where prohibitionists sought to follow suit. The determination of white majorities to exclude black children from public schools and mixed couples from marrying in the 1800’s in the North were met with the resistance of those who argued that the minority had rights that a majority could not simply dispense with simply because they had the numbers to do so. Soon, slave owners began to use the logic of the protection of minority rights to insist that they had a right to their slaves even if slavery were distasteful to the majority of the country’s voters.

Wherever people find themselves in the minority position, their arguments take a similar shape. “If the majority can impose their will on issue X, then why not issue Y and eventually Z?” “Doesn’t the Constitution grant the right of elected representatives to make law that listens to both the voters and the Constitution?” “When the Constitution guarantees to the States a system of ‘Republican Government,’ can legislatures, in good conscience, hand decisions back to the people to be made democratically without reference to minority rights?” “Is that really a Republican government?” “Can the majority dictate on matters of ‘taste’?” “If the majority prefer vanilla to strawberry ice cream, does that entitle it to make vanilla the only flavor available to citizens who’s tastes dictate otherwise?”

Similarly, those in the majority, will often hide their prejudice and bigotry behind a cover of love for democracy – a democracy that they would not love if they found themselves in the minority. There are many ironies regarding the way that people will migrate from one argument to its opposing argument as they move from an issue where they are in the majority to an issue where they are in the minority.

Over the course of the history of these arguments, so meticulously traced in this book, we begin to see the shape of an American approach to compromise. In America, majorities can rule but not without reference to minority rights. And rights, though democratic majorities are often tempted to make themselves the authors of them, are generally best left to the courts to determine (not always). That being said, court defined rights will exist or expire in a context of public opinion. You can plant a pineapple tree in Vermont but you can’t simply legislate its long term survival in a hostile climate. In the end, people must be convinced that a certain right, heretofore imagined, is real – that it indeed qualifies as a right. Rights to same sex marriage. Rights to public funded college educations. Rights to healthcare. Rights to a livable wage. Rights of political representation. Rights to the use of marijuana. Rights to equal pay. Reproductive rights. Rights to life. Rights to know what is in the food we eat. Rights to an appropriate education. School Choice.

So many of these issue that we face today are convoluted by the democratic process and its attempt to always please the majority in the face of a minority claim. Who is the authoritative source on the question of rights? Does the majority itself get to decide that question?

Question for Comment: I have sometime made the argument that we may need to create as many different words for “rights” as Eskimos have words for snow. By using the same word for a “right to life” (a universal claim) as we use for an asserted “right to $15 an hour for our work” (an arbitrary figure) we muddy the waters of national dialog. Not everything that we desire can be qualified as a right but it proves to be an effective way of bullying others into giving you what you want. You simply call what you want a “right” and presto, to deny you is to violate natural laws of the universe. But who would have the power to determine what desires get assigned to which words for “rights”? In the absence of some scriptural or clerical source that we all agree on, doesn’t the majority become the de facto God in the situation? Do we really have a right that a majority of voters have yet to vote us?

04/09/2016

Watched Concussion last night and Frontline’s League of Denial this morning. So now football gets added to the list of things that I am probably better off without. Time to go back to Sunday soccer I guess.

What is interesting is how long we can go on studying something if we do not wish to arrive at a particular conclusion. The NFL began looking into the problems with brain injury and concussions back in the mid 1990’s and they are still holding out in the hopes that further research will somehow determine that you can keep hitting a man’s head with a sledgehammer without an expectation of brain damage. In an article by Mike Florio, posted just last week on the NBC Sports website, it is clear that the NFL maintains that while football players do get their bells wrung a lot and while many former NFL players who have died, had brain damage, the links between the two things cannot be established.

“Research regarding the condition is “in its infancy,” and studies identifying CTE in deceased football players “have been based on a largely self-selected population and those studies have appropriately recognized this selection bias.” This means, according to Pash’s memo, that “there is no reliable evidence on the incidence or prevalence of CTE, either in professional football players or in the general population,” adding that “[t]he current state of the science does not permit any reliable statement about what events make a person more at risk to develop CTE.” Pash’s memo also states that the “causal relationship between concussions and CTE is unknown,” and that scientists and researchers have concluded that “the speculation that repeated concussion or subconcussive impacts cause CTE remains unproven.” Also, Pash explains that current studies “do not control for genetic, environmental or other individual risk factors.”

It is sort of like saying, “We know that we have been burning a lot of fossil fuels and we know that average temperatures are rising but we cannot prove that there is a link." Or “We know that people smoke and people have cancer but we cannot actually take video footage of the one thing causing the other thing.”

As long as the jury is still out, it is possible to make money.

Maybe they just need to get athletes to sign a waiver when they start to play. “I the undersigned, fully realize that my brain was not designed like a woodpeckers and that if I play this game involving woodpecker like hits to my head over and over and over, I am liable to damage my brain.” We do not let children smoke in schools but - we hold pep rallies to incite them to go give themselves brain damage on the school field? This does not make sense.

I conclude by saying that I have only been knocked out once in my life. I was a freshman in high school. I weighed about a 100lbs. A very large defenseman who went by the name of “Nuffer” and who played for the Middlebury high school team came up behind me in a game at Royce Mandigo arena and clobbered me. I think I can remember the dark storm cloud shadow that blocked the sky just before it happened. I do recall hauling my own carcass over the boards as the game went on.

If I acquire symptoms of CTE, I would ask those who have power of attorney to find “Nuffer” and sue him. Either him or my brother Tim, who rung my bell with tennis balls playing street hockey not a few times. Though my brother needs someone to sue him like he needs ... well ... a hole in the head.

Question for Comment: Assume for a moment that something that you enjoy turns out to be either not good for you or not good for the people involved in it. What is the right thing to do? If they agree that the risks are worth the benefits, are you still morally responsible for resulting ill effects if you continue to support the activity?

04/03/2016

“It is the oldest story ever told; the story of belief. Of the basic irresistible universal human need to believe in something that gives life meaning.”

Maria Konnikova calls con artists the “Aristocrats of Crime.” With “trust – sympathy – and persuasion” she insists, “the true con artist makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn’t steal. We give.” “We have a seemingly bottomless capacity for credulity,” she adds, “Gullibility may be deeply ingrained in the human behavioral repertoire for our minds are built for stories. We crave them and when they are not available, we create them.”

The book is an exploration of the psychological principles of the confidence game - step by step - and the game starts with basic human psychology. Each chapter is designed to focus attention on an aspect of a con and explain how human psychology can be used to explain how it happens.

In the first chapter, “The Grifter and the Mark” we learn more about who con artists are and who their victims usually are. We are encouraged not to make assumptions – particularly about our own vulnerabilities. We are far more susceptible than we may think we are. There is a certain irony to the fact that the ability to trust is a great asset to human survival and success. Those who succeed are often those who have greater capacities for trust. But the same trait is also where we can be most vulnerable. Those who trust more, may do better, but they are also perfect marks. Being optimistic and religious the author notes, makes you a particularly attractive mark because you are already self-identified as someone with the capacity for belief and unearned blessing.

In “The Put-up” we learn about how the confidence artist identifies a potential mark and creates a contextual setting for the con to take place.

In “The Play” we learn about the way that emotions are used to hack into our attentions. Through empathy and report the game begins with the creation of an emotional foundation. This is the part where we shut the force field of suspicion off. The con gets us to “like him” to “trust him” “to share our story with him” etc. We put our guard's down.

In “The Rope” the author delves into the use of reasoning and logic that drives that previously established trust towards our own demise. This is the part of the con where we are given the opportunity to bite the hook. Handing over our savings is made to sound reasonable.

In “The Tale” we get to explore the way that the con artist gets us to adopt his or her story as our own – or gets us to modify the story that we have been telling ourselves ever so slightly to his advantage. “Narrative thought is far more powerful than propositional thought” Konnikova explains. And if we can be induced to accept a story, there is little need for logic to do the heavy lifting. A con does not depend on convincing you to do something with hard evidence so much as it does on getting you to accept a certain well told narrative as being so. The well told story is slipped into that place where evidence should go.

In “The Convincer” we learn about the part of the con where the mark decides that the story not only may be true, but is true. Konnikova explains that by the time the confidence man has gotten us to want them to be a good friend want the story to be true, 90% of the battle is won because “preference needs no inference” (a fancy way of saying that when we want something to be so, it takes very little evidence to make us believe that it is so). Still, our rational minds need something to get us to sign off on an emotional predisposition. The convincer is the small piece of evidence that in the face of a desired outcome serves as all the evidence we need.

In “The Breakdown” we are given insights into how con artists deal with inevitable counter evidence. After all, the story that we have accepted as true is not a true story – parts of it will no doubt be true of course but significant parts of it will not be – and those untruths are bound to reveal themselves. The true con artist is prepared for that eventually and always has a “patch” that can be sewn into the original story to keep it from sinking too early. Indeed, talented cons will take the counter-evidence and weave it into the story as confirmation of the original story. If you want to see how this is done, watch the television series Better Call Saul and just watch the way that the lawyer Jimmy McGill works a story around counter-evidence.

In “The Send and the Touch” we read of several cases where the fleeced are fleeced more than once by the same rascal. Often the greater theft takes place after the original con has netted a portion of the possible take. In the Send and the Touch, the author explains how human psychology is used to get the mark who has been burned to double down with even more resources so as to salvage that which was lost. Rather than accept a significant loss, we are induced to anti up more in order to get it back. And this too is an exploitation of a psychological weakness in the human mind that really hates losing.

In “The Blow-Off and the Fix” the author explains how the confidence game continues even after the resources have been sucked out of us. The game has not fully been won if there is some chance that we will take retribution for our losses. To a con artist, we are a resource to be harvested for something. When that something is harvested, there are the shucks to dispose of. Even if we know we have been conned, there are psychological tools that can keep us from informing others liable to the same.

In the last chapter, “The (Real) Oldest Profession” Konnikova takes us back to the book of Genesis and reminds us that the oldest story in human religious history is of people being conned. The subtitle of her book “Why We Fall For It Every Time” is a statement of pessimistic despair in a way. The basic plot of that original story gets played out over and over in human history. The entire book is almost fatalistic in a way. We are told how confidence men work and we are given dozens and dozens of illustrations to show us how it has played out in the lives of thousands of people before us, but there is no real sense that a book like this is going to provide an anecdote to the problem. We are fundamentally wired to trust and until the world is free of those psychopathic personalities who derive a heightened satisfaction from taking their resources out of our vaults - while feeling no guilt for doing so, confidence games will continue to be played at our expense.

If we could shut capacity for trust off, we might be better off not doing so, even if it does mean that we will be conned from time to time. “I would rather be conned than cool” one former mentor of mine once said. But maybe, if we will take the time to better understand the bag of tricks that we are likely to be the victims of, we can ever so incrementally improve our chances of defending ourselves when the time comes.

Question for Comment: Does your life suffer from too much trust or too little?

The authors, both Nobel winning economists, insist that human beings have psychological vulnerabilities and thus need regulatory protections from them against those who specialize in exploiting vulnerabilities. “Just as our computers need protection against malware,” they argue, “so too we need protection against phishing for phools more broadly defined.” This book is the economic counterpunch to Reagan’s famous “Government is the problem” doctrine.

Akerlof and Shiller take strong opposition to the notion, argued by free market capitalists, that all markets will lead to their best ends when they are left unregulated. It is the author’s belief that having the freedom to make unlimited choices means having the freedom to be manipulated by people who are becoming ever more sophisticated at manipulating.

“It is a major reason why just letting people be free to choose – which Milton and Rose Friedman, for example, consider the sine qua non-of good public policy – leads to serious economic problems.”

So, just what are these vulnerabilities? The authors give illustrations one chapter at a time. But a passage is included that describes the various “Trojan horses” that the manipulators of this day and age use to “phish” us.

“Social psychologist\marketer Robert CIaldini has written a book full of impressive evidence of psychological biases. According to his list, we are phishable because we want to reciprocate gifts and favors; because we want to be nice to people we like; because we do not want to disobey authority; because we tend to follow others in deciding how to behave; because we want our decisions to be internally consistent; and because we are averse to taking losses. Following Cialdini, each of these respective biases is paired with common salesman's tricks.”

We are all capable of making mental mistakes, they say, and many of those mistakes “are aided and abetted by those who are trying to sell us something.” The problem is, they continue, that free markets do not just produce what we really want; they also produce what we can be made to want. “Just as Thomas Edison tested more than 1600 materials for the filament for the lightbulb, advertisers systematically use trial and error to see what causes us to buy what they want to sell.”

“Advertisers, by statistical tests, can also see what works and what does not. ... We will see that modern statistical techniques now tell marketers and advertisers – both private and political – where and how to phish, just as modern techniques in geology tell the oil and gas companies where and how to drill.”

“Phishing for fools is not some occasional nuisance,” the book concludes, “It is all over the place.” It is in the pharmaceutical industry where companies apply tactics to shape the drug approval process to their liking. It is in the political process where candidates get votes by saying one thing to the public and another to the sponsors that fund their campaigns. It is in the financial systems that play shell games with toxic mortgages to bilk investors out of their retirement monies. It is in businesses that acquire companies that have spent decades building reputations so that they can sell off for short term profit. It is in the news industry that pretends to give us the news that is important for us to know when it actually gives us worthless salacious details that our lizard brains salivate to know. It is in the advertising industry that gimmicks us into buying what they damn well know we don’t need.

I saw it in an Acura car ad just this evening.

“This is our point of view” the ad begins as a race car takes off on a track. We see the track as though we are the racecar. We are proverbially “out in front” winning as we see things from the car we are about to be told we should buy. For just a fraction of a second, we see an intense close up of a human eye refocusing on something. Subliminally, it says “Pay attention to this.” Flash to a boy for a second as if to bring us back to a state of childhood ourselves – a time before our frontal cortexes had developed. The boy focuses one eye. A man sits up in bed. He is in a bare and empty ordinary bedroom with some woman sleeping in bed next to him. The man turns the light on and the whole room paint changes color unperceptibly until you pause it on a rewind look. He reaches for a note book. For the slightest of seconds we see that it has a target drawn on it.

“If there’s a better way, take it,” a man’s voice says authoritatively. The words “Take it” appear on the screen for a second. The ‘a’ in “Take it” is the logo for Acura if you are watching closely.

“If there’s a claim, stake it.” The words “Stake it” appear for a second on the screen.

“If there’s a perception, escape it.” The word “escape it” appears as a beautiful woman pulls a visor down over her racing helmet.

“If there’s an open road, never waste it.” The word “never” appears very quickly and then the words “Waste it” - almost like the words “waste it” are a subliminal order to your unconscious to spend the money. The car is seen racing across an open salt flat. There are no roads. It is a picture of speed, thrill, and absolute freedom. When do any of us ever drive on a salt flat?

“And if there’s a dream to be chased, chase it.” The words, “chase it” flashed on the screen as the back end of the race car pulls ahead of you. You are no longer in the lead because you are no longer in their car. As if to say, “this car is something that you have to chase.” You are like one of those greyhounds in a race around a track given the scent of the rabbit. The owner will get paid thousands for your work. You will get dogfood.

Every shot has some sort of bright sunlight in your eyes, like klieg lights.

Take it. Stake it. Escape it. Waste it. Chase it.

This is not an add. It is an act of advertising hypnosis. And because it all happens in the matter of 20 seconds, we don’t know we have been “phished.”

“In each and every case” Akerlof and Shiller tell us, “the advertisements were successful because narratives from these ads were grafted onto the customers own [without their realizing it].” We have a story and those who want to grab our attention and sell us something graft their interest into our story so that we do not realize that our story has been coopted. When the story that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we need to do next involves chasing their product – their campaign – their commission, we have been phished.

If what this book is arguing is true, individuals are too childlike to be left to their own free will. They need a paternalistic government to watch over them and protect them from all the “wolves in sheep’s clothing” out there that lurk in the shadows preying on the gullible. We need protection from politicians who will vote to authorize money for a project that the public wants and then vote to appropriate only a fraction of it because their donors don’t want it. We need protection from drug companies who corrupt the drug approval process with benefits to doctors and researches that further their financial ends. We need protection from people who confuse us by using a single term for two very different things (what if we called stocks “lottery tickets” and lottery tickets, “stocks”?

The authors argue that we do not need education so much as protection. They argue that we must admit that common ordinary citizens informed will still never be a match for the ever evolving talents of con-men and that so long as unregulated freedom exists, the conning of the masses will prevail.

It is an interesting argument.

Question for Comment: What do you think? Would you rather pay government to protect you from those who would manipulate you to their ends, or would you rather soldier on trying to protect yourself from the wiles of those who wake up every day “phishing for phools”?